Between the Wolf and the Crocodile: The Pragmatic Currents of the Islamic State (original) (raw)

The Sunni Arab Intelligentsia in Iraq: State, Nationhood, Citizenship

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2018

This study argues that the interpretive theoretical approach generally taken by 4 Sunni Arabs toward building the Iraqi state and nation has undergone multiple transformations since 2003, which taken together are consistent with the response patterns of a community alienated from its surroundings. These patterns begin with the experience of withdrawal, then resistance, then adaptation to the environment formed by the majority of groups that make up Iraqi society and its members. In the first case, withdrawal, the Sunni Arab community abandoned its objectives and the means to achieve them, taking a passive, patient stance. In the second case, the Sunni Arab community chose objectives it sought to achieve by any means necessary, including negative means like taking up arms. In the third, the Sunni Arab community transformed to choose objectives compatible with positive means guaranteed by the democratic mechanisms steering the political process in Iraq. With regard to the driver of those response patterns, this study argues that it goes back to what we can call “patterns of communication” that are affected by faceto-face interactions with individuals from other sectarian and ethnic groups and the government, in addition to the effects of the media and political discourse on opposing sides. These patterns of communication shape the community’s response to state- and nation-building issues.

Lineages of the Islamic State: An international historical sociology of State (de‐)formation in Iraq

Journal of Historical Sociology , 2019

Existing accounts of the Islamic State (IS) tend to rely on orientalist and technicist assumptions and hence insufficiently sensitive to the historical, sociological, and international conditions of the possibility of IS. The present article provides an alternative account through a conjunctural analysis that is anchored in an international historical sociology of modern Iraq informed by Leon Trotsky's idea of 'uneven and combined development'. It foregrounds the concatena-tion of Iraq's contradictory (post‐)colonial nation‐state formation with the neoliberal conjuncture of 1990‐2014. It shows that the former process involved the tension‐prone fusion of governing institutions of the modern state and the intermittent but steady reproduction, valorization, and politicization of supra‐national (religious‐sectarian) and sub‐national (ethno‐tribal) collective identities , which subverted the emergence of an Iraqi nation. The international sanctions regime of the 1990s transformed sectarian and tribal difference into communitarian tension by fatally undermining the integrative efficacy of the Ba'ath party's authoritarian welfare‐ state. Concurrently, the neo‐liberal demolition of the post‐colonial authoritarian welfare states in the region gave rise to the Arab Spring revolutions. The Arab Spring however elicited a successful authoritarian counter‐revolution that eliminated secular‐nationalist forms of oppositional politics. This illiberal neoliberalisation of the region's political economy valorised the religionisation of the domestic effects of the 2003 US‐led destruction of the Iraqi state and its reconstruction on a majoritarian basis favouring the Shi'as and hence transforming sectarian tension into sectarian conflict culminating in IS. Thus, IS is, the paper demonstrates, the result of neither an internal cultural pathology nor sheerly external forces. Rather, it is the novel product of an utterly historical congealment of the intrinsically interactive and multilinear dynamics of socio‐ political change.

The Iraq Legacies and the Roots of the ‘Islamic State’

With the deadly ISIS advance, the sudden rousing of Shia militias and the threat of Kurdish secession, Iraq faces a host of deep-seated and intractable problems. Together, these events raise a number of serious questions, not just for Iraq and its future but also for the broader Middle East, the United States and its Coalition partners and the international community. While these challenges and questions will drive much academic debate, political analysis and media discussion in the months and years ahead, they are not the central purpose of this chapter. While there is always a risk in commenting on unfolding events, including the potential to overstate their significance and likely long-term impact, it is difficult to ignore the significance of the deadly ISIS advance and all that has happened since. This chapter argues that key to understanding these events is coming to terms with the three varied and complex legacies of the 2003 Iraq War. The first central legacy of the Iraq War is the ongoing consequences of several critical mistakes made by the US-led Coalition before, during and immediately after the 2003 intervention. The second legacy addressed here is the fact that the 2003 war shattered – perhaps irreversibly - Iraqis fragile cultural mosaic and its rich and complex history of overlapping and intersecting communities, ideologies and narratives. The third and final legacy of the 2003 Iraq War detailed in this chapter is its significant regional and global consequences – from spiralling sectarianism across the Middle East to a profound challenge to America’s status as the last remaining superpower and its use of military power for ‘humanitarian’ ends. The argument here is that these three important legacies set in train a sequence of events that have served as the collective catalyst for the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ from mid-2014.

The king of Salah al-Din: the power of Iraq's Sunni elites

2021

The Conflict Research Programme is a four-year research programme hosted by LSE IDEAS and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Our goal is to understand and analyse the nature of contemporary conflict and to identify international interventions that 'work' in the sense of reducing violence or contributing more broadly to the security of individuals and communities who experience conflict.

The Islamic State, Shia religious clerics and the mobilisation of Shia militias in Iraq and Syria

Contemporary Politics, 2023

This article focuses on the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Shia communities and their holy sites across Iraq and Syria and explores the responses of key Shia religious and political leaders. It demonstrates how these Shia elites utilised sophisticated mobilisation frames to admonish their followers to take up arms against the IS. To do so, these Shia elites drew on Shia religious symbols and historical events that emphasise Shia suffering at the hands of Sunni forces and highlighted the urgent need to protect Shia communities and their holy sites. The article also demonstrates how these mobilisation frames were malleable in the hands of different Shia elites and were instrumentalized to advance both national (defend the country) and transnational goals (defend Shia Islam). The article concludes by noting that this study of the complex motives underpinning Shia mobilisation has implications beyond the case of contemporary Iraq and Syria.

Regionalization of Political Violence: Arab Levant and Rise of Islamic State

Globalization has exacerbated the threat of transnational terrorism in the Middle Eastern region which is already marked with several fault lines including sectarian divide, authoritarianism, poor governance and religious extremism. Not only have the regional structural and territorial dimension of the region elevated the influence of the violent non-state actors, they have also led to the emergence of a new non-state actor, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has adopted entirely different practices from other non-state actors including al-Qaeda. Structural dimension consisting of sectarian divide and fractured state structure has helped ISIS to compartmentalize the society in Iraq and Levant and the territorial dimension has provided it an opportunity in attracting foreign fighters and gaining wealth on an unprecedented level. This paper explains the sudden rise of the ISIS as a formidable force in Middle East. It the context of globalization of the non-state actors and violence in which it explains the rise of Islamists and it argues that the political, economic and social situation of the ISIS-controlled territories in Iraq and Syria was already fertile to be exploited. Had it not been ISIS, there could have been someone else who could have exploited the situation, filled the power vacuum and enjoyed all of the robust indicators exploited by the Islamist organization. This study is based on an explanatory approach and relies on secondary data, particularly newspaper and electronic media sources

Islamic State the Product of a Bridging Between Regional Competitions and Islamic Radicalism

The Islamic state that was formed in 2006 in territories outside the control of two war-torn countries, with the capture of the city of Mosul in 2014 was world famous and be of interest to all news circles across the globe. This state used extremely cruel methods in relation to its prisoners of war, which is not a venue to discuss in this paper, came more than ever to fill the headlines of newspapers and online media. After a period of relative silence news, now with fighting to retake the city of Mosul, the "Islamic state" is once again under the focus of the news circles. This paper intends to review primarily on the formation of the "Islamic State" and introduce a summary of the main factors involved in forming this state with a slightly different perspective than the views have been described earlier.